Thursday, 21 February 2013

Grandville: Bete Noire

Bryan Talbot
Jonanthon Cape

The Badger is back! At
Toad Hall, lair of multibillionaire Baron Aristotle Krapaud, a cabal of
industrialists and fat cats plot the violent overthrow of the French
state by the intervention of horribly beweaponed automaton soldiers. Meanwhile,
the brutal murder of a famous Parisian artist, mysteriously stabbed to
death in his locked and guarded studio, is subject to the investigations
of the tenacious Detective Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard, placing
him and his faithful adjunct, Detective Sergeant Roderick Ratzi, in
pursuit of the mysterious masked assassin stalking the cut-throat
commercial world of the Grandville art scene. Bete Noire signals the
welcome return to anthropomorphic steampunk detective fiction of master
storyteller and graphic novel pioneer Bryan Talbot with the
third stand-alone volume of the Eisner and Hugo Award nominated
Grandville series. As the body count mounts and events spiral
exponentially out of control, aided by his brilliant deductive abilities
and innate ferocity, LeBrock battles against outrageous odds in this
funny, high octane thriller, an adventure shot through with both high
art and comic book references, a glorious illegitimate offspring of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming - with animals! Follow the Badger!

In the previous 2 volumes of Grandville LeBrock had dispatched the King of France an the then both his Chief Inspector and the Prime Minister. This leaves him with a fairly large space where potential enemies could be in this 3rd volume. In actual fact we get LeBrock versus the middle class industrialists and their plot to overthrow the revolutionary government that has taken over France since the death of the king. And, we get a sneak preview of who is going to be the villain of the fourth book.

As with the first two volumes this was superb, maybe even better than the previous.

LeBrock is asked by his friend the French Chief Inspector to assist after the murder of an artist. LeBrock is soon hot on the trail of the killer through the artistic community of Grandville (Paris) and also the abundance of machinery / robots that are suddenly all over the place. He also revitalises his relationship with the feisty Billie who proves herself more than equal to him both intellectually and physically as she helps defend the barricades, alongside the always fantastic and very dapper Roderick Ratzi, whilst LeBrock is off tackling those at the root of the plan.

It keeps on getting better and better this. Full of action and intrigue but with well defined characters who are becoming even more so as they reveal themselves on the page

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Welcome...

...to this repository of imaginings upon the vagaries of steam.Please leave your cloak and hat with the maid and set awhile with brandy and cigar and peruse my brief reflections upon the fanciful and oft-time scandalous activities of the individuals depicted in the pages of these penny-dreadfuls and in the flickers of the zoetropic daguerrotypes.